Lightroom 1, Aperture 0 ?

Note: I'm not sure exactly where to put this, and I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir in this forum. Happy to move this to wherever appropriate. Comments welcome.

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A Chinese proverb states "One foot cannot stand on two boats." Apple tried this for some time with Aperture, their professional photography workflow app, and with iPhoto, their simple viewer and editor. In my opinion, they did neither very well. I never understood why you have to bloat your hard drive with duplicates of photos (iPhoto). And Aperture never really was able to compare with Adobe's Lightroom - an amazing app that began as a kind of "let's see what we can do" project conjured by the company's in-house photographers that sat in Adobe's think tank until the day Apple announced Aperture.

Today, Apple announced the end of Aperture, as we know it. Both Aperture and iPhoto will be replaced with one app aimed at the middle ground. This may indeed be an admission of failure but it may just as well represent an astute awareness of the direction that photography has taken in the past several years: technologies that were formerly available only to professionals willing to wield medium format cameras on fixed tripods (scene shift to Ansel Adams in Yosemite) who were willing to spend hours in the darkroom dodging and burning, are now miniaturized into pocketable consumer cameras highlighted by the surge of the new mirror-less camera format. Many of these features can even be found on common smart phones.

This pocketable camera – an Olympus Pen – has a 16 megapixel sensor, can shoot 8 frames per second at up to 1/8000 second, is weather-proof, has 5-axis internal image stabilization, takes over 25 different interchangeable lenses, records professional quality video in stereo, and can stream photos directly to a smart phone. Indeed, it can be operated remotely by an iPhone.

Is Apple Making the Right Decision?

"I'm a bit surprised that this announcement is taking ANYONE by surprise. My surprise is that it took Apple this long to kill Aperture. Making some of Aperture's functionality more accessible (as Photos) will serve more consumers and in the long run, make Apple more money."

Maybe. In the meantime, the rest of us have Lightroom. And Adobe does not appear to be standing still. They recently launched an iPad version that manages to dumb down an incredibly complex workflow program into a simple photo viewer and editor, while keeping the advanced features that pro's would expect - all synchronized seamlessly from their Lightroom catalogs on their computers, directly to the iPad.

Pretty nifty stuff. I like where this is all headed.*

* But so do others. Currently, over 5 million new photos are posted to the internet each day, more than any individual could view in an entire lifetime. Better hone up on the basics of composition!

I can't be alone is wondering how I'd ever store my tens of thousands of images shot/year in the cloud, much less access them in anything approaching real time. What am I missing here?

"with the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.

I can't be alone is wondering how I'd ever store my tens of thousands of images shot/year in the cloud, much less access them in anything approaching real time. What am I missing here?

"with the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.

Cheers,

Rick

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"Whiskey is for drinking, digicams are for fighting over."—Mark Twain

I wonder the same. But the truth is, 5 million photos a day are sent up into the Cloud. They're just not very well organized

A Chinese proverb states "One foot cannot stand on two boats." Apple tried this for some time with Aperture, their professional photography workflow app, and with iPhoto, their simple viewer and editor.

I use LR 5.5 and PSE 9 and am pretty happy with them. I do wish LR was a bit snappier in operation, but it is still quite usable and a big improvement over my workflow a few years ago using PS CS2 and Bridge.

I wonder if your comment above about the Chinese proverb and Apple might also apply a bit to Adobe? LR on one side and then PS/Bridge and PSE/Organizer on the other. Actually, sort of one foot on three boats.

Not too surprised (just taken aback), but it's a shame to see it go. Aperture had so much going for it. . . but I suppose it wasn't cost-efficient to take it much further (which is why it wasn't as competitive as it could have been - even for a Mac-only app). I seem to recall it wasn't their code in the first place, and so it can tend to go.

I wanted to stick w/Aperture, but it just wasn't keeping up. I use iPhoto as little as necessary (and grudgingly). But the alternative to come should be interesting. . . maybe it'll be what iPhoto should/could have been all along, finally.

This pocketable camera – an Olympus Pen – has a 16 megapixel sensor, can shoot 8 frames per second at up to 1/8000 second, is weather-proof, has 5-axis internal image stabilization, takes over 25 different interchangeable lenses, records professional quality video in stereo, and can stream photos directly to a smart phone. Indeed, it can be operated remotely by an iPhone.

A Chinese proverb states "One foot cannot stand on two boats." Apple tried this for some time with Aperture, their professional photography workflow app, and with iPhoto, their simple viewer and editor.

I wonder if your comment above about the Chinese proverb and Apple might also apply a bit to Adobe? LR on one side and then PS/Bridge and PSE/Organizer on the other. Actually, sort of one foot on three boats.

Henry, good point. I had kind of forgotten about PSE. As for PS, I rarely use that for editing photos; rather I use it for graphics work like creating mockups for my software business. I can do pretty much everything I want on LR except for HDR and Panorama stitching.